Tech
Facebook Allowed Netflix and Spotify to Read Your ‘Private’ Messages
If you thought that your chats on Facebook were private, think again.
The Silicon Valley tech giant, which views its users only as collectors of data to be sold to third parties, was caught doing just that, according to a Tuesday New York Times report.
“Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages,” the report said.
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Despite Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s April testimony to Congress that Facebook had implemented strict privacy protections for its users, it continued to allow third party applications to access the data of those same users.
“In all, the deals described in the documents benefited more than 150 companies — most of them tech businesses, including online retailers and entertainment sites, but also automakers and media organizations,” the report said. “Their applications sought the data of hundreds of millions of people a month, the records show. The deals, the oldest of which date to 2010, were all active in 2017. Some were still in effect this year.”
Facebook has been embroiled in privacy scandals for the past two years. Just last week, Big League Politics reported that Facebook leaked millions its users’ of photos to third parties. In April, Facebook faced a huge amount of backlash after the public found out that 87 million accounts had been compromised by Cambridge Analytica, a data mining firm.
In 2015, the tech giant faced a similar scandal when third party applications downloaded by a users were sucking data from that user’s Facebook friends.
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Tech
Gab Attacked in Coordinated Hacking Attempt, Timed to Coincide with CPAC
This hack coincided with Trump’s CPAC speech.
Free speech social media platform Gab was attacked in a coordinated hacking operation sometime this weekend, with malicious actors briefly compromising accounts of prominent users of the platform.
Gab founder Andrew Torba disclosed the cyberattack, revealing that left-wing operatives had sought to compromise both his own Gab account and an archive account reserved for President Donald Trump. The attack compromised Trump’s reserved account minutes before the President was slated to speak on-stage at CPAC- with the timing suggesting the President may announce he’s joining the free speech social media service.
It’s unclear which other accounts were targeted. Torba confirmed that Gab was cooperating with law enforcement in response to the breach. Alt-tech competitor Parler also suffered from frequent data breaches and insecurity, and it may be that powerful institutions determined to take down Parler have shifted their focus to terroristic tactics targeting Gab.
Gab has been targeted on previous occasions by entities that oppose its mission to restore free speech on the internet. Torba’s disclosure of the incident differs greatly from the deceptive business tactics of Facebook and Twitter, which regularly decline to reveal data breaches and sell user information to corporations and governments at a whim and without any user consent.
Big League Politics is monitoring the situation for any further developments.
Follow me on Gab @WildmanAZ, Twitter @Wildman_AZ, and on Parler @Moorhead.
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